TECH COMPANIES: We want to become a central part of everyone’s lives, deeply integrated into how you live and work

SEX WORKERS: Great, love it

TECH COMPANIES: Not you tho

Capitalism and censorship and tech just all makes me go round and round in circles until I fall asleep.

Younger me smugly thought that free speech absolutism was the correct answer, but I’ve since seen way too much harm come from online abuse and conspiracy theory mongering...

So now it’s like, well, yeah, *some* censorship and content policy is clearly warranted — but the question then becomes, whose value system are you going to uphold?

And for corporate America, the answer is still an upsettingly conservative one.

There are two components here, honestly: there’s the free speech/sexual freedom component, and there’s the right to make a livelihood component.

The former is always going to be a tension in corporate spaces — even in the wild, wild west days of the internet adult companies had to deal with being persona non grata on various platforms (you sure couldn’t host your adult site on GoDaddy’s servers, for instance).

But the latter has become more urgent as tech companies have integrated themselves into our lives such that we can’t make a living without them, and they’ve disrupted so many industries that many of us can’t make a living, period.

I said this yesterday, but the Instagram anti-sex shit wouldn’t be as big a deal if Facebook hadn’t made it impossible to make a living if you’re not on its services.

But Facebook wants to be an essential service. And it also wants to be sex-free.

And that’s catastrophic for people who need to make a living off of sex.

And there is, of course, an irony to the fact that quite a few people who are making a living off of sex are doing so *because* Facebook, et al, have depressed wages in their preferred industry.

Anyway. I’m no longer the smug twentysomething who thinks the answer is just FREE SPEECH!!!!!, because, as I said above, absolute free speech causes problems, absolutely.